Search results for "agency."

EFL Teacher Education in Finland : Manifestations of Professional Agency in Teacher Educators’ Work

2020

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher educators play a key role in the development of university-based teacher education and the preparation of preservice EFL teachers. However, the professional agency of EFL teacher educators in developing their work remains understudied. Employing a Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical perspective, this research considers the individual and collective professional agency of eight EFL teacher educators at two Finnish universities. Findings demonstrate that individual professional agency is enacted in the expression of professional identity and the development of professional relationships, and in offering and receiving professional assistance. Findin…

Special issue on Insights into Applied Linguistics: Languaging, agency and ecologies : Editorial

2014

Studying the Cognitive Map of the US States: Ideology and Prosperity Stereotypes Predict Interstate Prejudice

2018

What are the spontaneous stereotypes that U.S. citizens hold about the U.S. states? We complemented insights from theory-driven approaches to this question with insights from a novel data-driven approach. Based on pile sorting and spatial arrangement similarity ratings for the states, we computed two cognitive maps of the states. Based on ratings for the states on ∼20 candidate dimensions, we interpreted the dimensions that spanned the two maps (Studies 1 and 2). Consistent with the agency/socioeconomic success, conservative-progressive beliefs, and communion (ABC) model of spontaneous stereotypes, these dimensions that participants spontaneously used to rate the states’ similarity included…

"You've got the color, but you dont't have the shades" : primary education CLIL teachers' identity negotiation within the Finnish context

2018

This dissertation explores how professional identity is experienced by teachers in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) instruction. In particular, it addresses professional identity in relation to two immediate contexts of teacher activity, i.e. that of the classroom and that of the collegial community. In addition to exploring how these two sides of the professional self give rise to a broader understanding of professional identity, this dissertation also explores aspects of professional agency and the negotiation of emotions in their work. The dissertation is founded on fourteen interviews with Finnish kindergarten and primary education teachers doing CLIL. The data were thema…

Cultural Politics of Love and Provision among Poor Youth in Urban Tanzania

2015

This article examines how urban youth in the poorest neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam negotiate the terms of transactional intimacy, that is, heterosexual relations in which men are expected to provide for women materially. Using the concept of ‘affect’, I argue that this negotiation involves different levels of male providership, as well as moral values attached to notions of ‘true love’ and the Swahili concept of tamaa. Poor men and women view their agency differently within transactional intimacy, with women describing themselves as exploited by men who do not fulfil their end of the transactional bargain, and poor men portraying themselves as deeply disempowered in comparison to wealthie…

The construction of academic identity in the changes of Finnish higher education

2013

This article sets out to explore how academics make sense of the current transformations of higher education and what kinds of academic identities are thereby constructed. Based on a narrative analysis of 42 interviews with Finnish academics, nine narratives are discerned, each providing a different answer as to what it means to be an academic in the present-day university. Narratives of resistance, loss, administrative work overload and job insecurity are embedded in a regressive storyline, describing deterioration of academic work and one's standing. In a sharp contrast, narratives of success, mobility and change agency rely on a progressive storyline which sees the current changes in a p…

Agentic perspective on fostering work-related learning

2017

Despite the increased recognition of the role that professional agency plays in work-related learning, little is known about what supports it. Based on current theoretical notions, the first purpose of this paper is to show that professional agency is closely intertwined with work-related learning. The second purpose is to introduce some main principles that promote professional agency and describe three work-related training settings that are aimed at fostering learning by taking into account agentic perspectives. These complementary settings include an identity coaching programme, a leadership coaching programme, and a work conference. Based on the qualitative meta-synthesis, the paper fu…

Negotiating female judoka identities in Greece : A Foucauldian discourse analysis

2015

Abstract Objectives The objectives of this paper are to trace the discourses through which female Greek judokas articulate their sporting experiences and to explore how they construct their identities through the negotiation of sociocultural beliefs and gender stereotypes. Design This article is based on interview data from a larger ethnographic research with women judo athletes, grounded in a cultural praxis framework. Method Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted during fieldwork in Greece. Interview data were analyzed drawing on a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis. Results We identified four concepts—biology, gender, femininity, and judo/sport—that were central to unearth…

Striving for Inclusion through Participatory Practices in Social Enterprises

2019

The aim of this research case is to shed some empirical light on the effects of participatory practices from the perspective of Sen’s capability approach in a Finnish social enterprise. Using a mixed method approach we explore how participatory practices build social inclusion by enabling both company’s employees and customers to engage in social agency. The case study findings articulate the importance of participatory practices to employees’ perceptions of meaningfulness of life and being able to meet customers (who are mentally disabled) needs on the one hand and customers’ experience of information sharing and feedback giving to the employees and helping other customers. peerReviewed

CLIL Challenges : Secondary School CLIL Teachers’ Voices and Experienced Agency in Three European Contexts

2020

This qualitative interview study focuses on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) teacher agency in three European contexts, Austria, Finland and Andalusia, Spain. The aim of the study is to understand how individual CLIL teachers experience their agency when encountering challenges in their work and to demonstrate the multifaceted quality of their agency. The study employs the Listening Guide method (Gilligan, 2015) to listen to the voices of three secondary school subject teachers from three diverse contexts. The analysis shows that CLIL challenges both empowered and disempowered the teachers depending on how meaningful they found their work and what their possibilities to act w…